Heatmaps are graphical overlays of your website which points out what content is hot and what not. This is the third part of the article about the heatmaps and alternatives for Crazy Egg. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know or drop a comment below.
Another free heatmap comes from Labs Media and is called Clickheat. This open source application uses php and needs to be installed on your server. To make things easier, they developed Clickheat as a wordpress plugin as well.
After several search strings into google I came across this article on heatmaps written by Matt Ridout and gave me some new insights of Labs Media. Apparently the plugin adds a little link into your webpages back to the website of Labs Media, which can conflict with some searchengines. It’s not difficult to remove the link, but I’m not really fond of this kind of strategy.
SimpleHeatmaps has a very simplistic approach to heatmaps. SimpleHeatmaps does what it says and does it well. No unnecessary bells and whistles. So don’t expect any fancy filters (in fact, don’t expect any), additional information about your visitors or anything else that might be worth looking at. Maybe a bit too thin for my taste.
Beside the heatmaps (click, attention and scroll), it also offers live screen and form recording. The first month is completely free of charge. After that you will need to choose a paying plan if you would like to continue with the tool!
The next free trackingsystem is called “The definite heatmap” by Corunet and is a “do it yourself solution“. Corunet gives you the opportunity to build your own heatmap, this way you have a better understanding how these programs work. For the lazy people among us: you can download all necessary files at the end of the tuturial.
What I immediately liked about Clickdensity is the ease of implementation – just five lines of code – and the ease of use. With only four buttons you can choose between the normal heat map, the click map, the hover map and the page stats. The page stats however shows minimal information because Clickdensity does not collect much data other than the X and Y coordinates of the clicks to generate the heatmap. You can filter the clicks by browser, click time, date and screen size.
A very nice feature is the ability to attach the X and Y click coordinates to a certain element of your page. This can be necessary when you update your website on regular bases with new content, meaning a change in lay-out. A minor setback however is that it takes quiet some time to generate the heatmap overlays. They offer a 30 day trail, in which you can fully test the functionalities. If you’re looking for a straightforward and easy to use heatmap application without extensive analytical information, you should definitely try Clickdensity.
As mentioned before, heatmaps are better used on static websites than dynamic ones. The content on dynamic website is often changed (e.g. new posts/comments on blogs), this in contrast with the coordinates of the recorded clicks made by the visitors. This shouldn’t be a problem if you update your blog/website monthly and attract a serious amount of visitors.
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This Australian company, named Picnet, has two heatmap systems: the eye tracking heatmap and the click heatmap. The name “eye tracking heatmap” can be a bit misleading because there is no eye tracking going on. Picnet justifies the name with the result of certain studies, which claims:
“There is a strong correlation (84%) between the regions of website pages scanned by your eyes and the regions visited by the mouse cursor. Additionally, 88% of regions that are not scanned by the eyes are also not visited by the mouse cursor.”
So instead of tracking the eyes, Picnet tracks the mouse movements.
There are two ways to display the click heatmap – a general map of the sectors your visitors are scanning with their eyes, and a more detailed view that shows the pattern of mouse clicks on each area of the page. It also tracks mouse movements and shows you the website architecture and user movements throughout the website.
If you subscribe for a free account, you need to mention Picnet’s website with a small line of text which is provided by them. To get rid of this text you will need to upgrade to a premium account, which costs A$2,000 per annum per domain or A$500 per month per domain.
The free account however delivers very useful information but has some downsides.
For example, it doesn’t keep your data longer than 2 weeks, it doesn’t record any keyboard interaction (which is useful for investigating your forms) and it does’t show user interactions with the page (so no AJAX or drop down menu’s for example).
Continue reading on the fourth page for even more heatmap systems.
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Very accurate job!
Another solution to avoid performance issues, could be to have a separate server just for heatmap.
What do you think?
P.S.
I didn't know CrazyEgg has got commercial, damn!
If the cost-benefit ratio was ok, then this would be a great solution... but only for those websites which attract a lot of visitors. More visitors means more clicks to be recorded, so they would certainly benefit of a second server.
great post, thanks kindly
You're welcome Dave!
I am new to the world of web analytics and i think the functions are unbeleivable. I have an online private business and it has always been so frustrating to me how i could not observe the activity of my customers. I came accross ClickTale analytics on a similar blog and i tried out the free option offered and my eyes have been opened. I now feel confident to adjust my website according to the behaviour i can see in the videos and all the heatmaps. Its so simple and so effective, I wish i had found it earlier.
@Steve Mann: Thank you for the comment Steve. Since a few weeks now I've been testing ClickTale as well. I'll let you know my findings as well.
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@ArticleDirectory: And thank you for the nice comment! Hopefully you like the rest of the website as well. :)
Love the list thanks so much.
Regarding clickheat - I installed it on the checkout pages of a store to see how people used the page.
A while later the site owner complained that when he viewed the checkout pages he got the IE 'this page contains secure and insecure content' error, and he worried that this was reducing the conversion rate. I checked and checked and checked again, and I couldn't find any non-https images.
Eventually I finally realised what was happening - it was the clickheat script that was the insecure content on the https page!
@Stuart: Hi Stuart, nice to hear that you like this list and thanks for your interesting comment. I've been using Clickheat sporadically for a few months now (actually only used it to write this article and test it a bit) and I never crossed this IE error message before. The implemented code from Clickheat seems a bit aggressive and maybe a good thing to keep it out of the secure checkout pages. I can imagine that the CR dropped down a bit because of this message, but maybe you can switch to a less intrusive package.
Although I find Clickheat's system interesting (follow the mousemovements of the visitor), I prefer to use A/B testing in checkout pages to increase the CR.